Owens Corning is known for insulation. The pink fluffy stuff that gets rolled into your attic often carries the Owens Corning brand. They also make another kind of insulation of which not many people are aware. That other kind is acoustic insulation.

Acoustic insulation helps cut down on noise. Acoustic insulation is used between units in condominiums to keep the noise of one family out of the neighbor’s living quarters, for example. It is also used within homes where one room is generally very noisy and others in the house don’t want to be bothered. This could be because of an attached woodshop or even a home theater room where some members of the family insist on theater level volume as they watch the latest movies with deep rumbling bass tones that accompany all the action.

In these cases, the material of choice is often Owens Corning 703 or the thicker Owens Corning 705. Both are rigid fiberglass panels that absorb sound waves rather than reflect all the sound back into the room or allow it to pass through into the next room. For home theater rooms, both properties are helpful. Aside from keeping the home theater sounds within the home theater room, the use of Owens Corning 703 acoustic panels can also improve the quality of sound within the home theater room.

It works by reducing the amount of echo or reflected sound waves that bounce off the walls and reach the listener’s ear a split second behind the sound from the original source. While the delay is generally too short to be picked up by human senses, it does affect the balance of frequencies that are heard. Different frequencies reflect off solid surfaces with different efficiencies, meaning that when they are added back into the sound from the original source, some frequencies receive more boost than others. This can make music sound harsh and unnatural.

Oddly enough, many department stores equalize their demonstration systems this way to help the vocals cut through the noise of the busy store. While it may sound good initially, over the course of fifteen to twenty minutes, the ear starts to become fatigued by the unnatural balance and the listener often finds that they just don’t enjoy it anymore without really understanding why. While that may be OK for a department store, it isn’t ok for your home and especially for your home theater room. The simple application of acoustically absorptive panels can help alleviate this problem and make listening a pleasure, no matter how long the movie lasts.

Even commercial spaces were sound is important can benefit from proper attention acoustic design. Church acoustics, for example, run the range of spoken voice for sermons, to choirs, to the deep bass of pipe organs or modern bands. This wide range of both frequencies and volumes can be very demanding on the listeners if the acoustics in the room are not right. Materials like those made by Owens Corning are widely used in these applications to make sure that every seat in the house is getting a good acoustic experience.